Chris and art

“	She theorizes it’s because I'm a creative genius.	”
Chris, talking about his mom

My Mind Is a Blank, January 2015

How Chris sees his self-portraits.

Art has been, and always will be, Chris's selling point. Ever since the very day Jason Kendrick Howell found out about Chris's creation of Sonichu, many people have taken interest in Chris because of his infamously bad artwork. Encouraging Chris to produce more of it remains a popular objective amongst trolls and weens.

Artistic analysis of Sonichu

Exercise of skills and improvement in craft

Not bad for a grade-schooler.

Chris does not seem to consider his artistic skill in need of revision; he is always fully satisfied by the first attempt at a drawing he makes. Naturally, being an artist of that caliber, Chris takes it upon himself to criticize the art that his True and Loyal Fanbase send to him, and is quick to point out the myriad of "flaws" in each work.

Chris has said he spends "an hour at most" drawing a comic page and about a half-hour coloring it. He does not seem to be aware of the fact that producing the kind of high-quality artwork that fans expect in a good comic strip is very labor-intensive and can easily take hours, sometimes days, even with professional software programs like Photoshop. He also doesn't seem to understand, or care, that any good artist will draw a scene multiple times before they publish it, especially if there are mistakes. In pretty much any episode of Sonichu, you will be sure to find at least one mistake Chris has made that he refuses to redo and simply colors over. One good example is the scene from Chris and Ivy going to a hotel for hanky-panky. If you look at the scene, you can see multiple mistakes that any artist would have seen as a reason to redo the picture. Chris started to draw his balls (via tracing), but decided he didn't like the proportions that presented, so he decided to keep the start of the trace and just add some "speed lines". If you look at the picture of Ivy you will see that Chris messed up a bit around her face but decided that instead of redoing it, he'd just color over it. He also messed up a bit on her right breast; he drew one too small and decided to make it bigger, by just adding another curved line.

At times, he would expand Sonichu stories in summary form on CWCipedia, a medium better equipped to keep up with his racing, easily distracted imagination. Everything he says or writes, he considers to be a part of his comic's continuity partly because it is easier to record these euphoric and fleeting bouts of inspiration as they occur rather than days, weeks, months, or even years later in comic form.

Choices of materials and technology

Crayola is the official art supplier for the Sonichu franchise, whether they like it or not.

Chris believes that his so-called "hand-drawn style" is superior to art produced by any other means. This is due to Chris's hatred to change what he has already learned and his belief, as a consequence of his ego, that his method is the best by virtue of being his.

Obviously, Chris's skill cannot compensate for the poor materials he uses. He does his work a disservice by using tools that are the cheapest available: copy paper, Pentel RSVP ballpoint pens, and Crayola washable markers. These happen to be the tools he has used since childhood.

Far from archival quality, his art has sometimes shown signs of wrinkling as soon as it has been finished. Chris has defended his practice of rampant textwalling as a way to "save marker ink."

While Chris has claimed at various times to use Adobe Photoshop to create his characters and edit his comics, he has only ever been seen using Adobe PhotoDeluxe, with which he created his slanderous head-swap of Clyde's buddy Matt. This is in spite of the fact that PhotoDeluxe is intended for scanning and touching up photographs, and Photoshop (which Chris claims to own) would be better suited for the kind of general-purpose image editing and head-swapping that Chris does. In addition, PhotoDeluxe is a dinosaur of a program that hasn't been supported by Adobe since 2002. Chris's claim in Mailbag 3 that he uses "a past version" of Photoshop could imply that he is confusing PhotoDeluxe for a part of the Photoshop line, or that, if he really does use Photoshop, the revision he owns is just as woefully out-of-date as his ancient PhotoDeluxe program.

His font of choice is Comic Sans, a font almost universally condemned for being overused, childish and ugly.

He also believes that using new technology creatively provides an unfair advantage in the service of inferior results. Repeatedly, he has called Asperchu "blocky and low resolution" because it was drawn with a tablet, this is most likely because Chris thinks that doing digital art instead of the traditional way makes results comparable to poor MS Paint drawings that are more familiar with him. In one of his phone calls to Alec Benson Leary, Chris said his hand-drawn art had "more character" (never mind that tablet art is technically hand-drawn art anyway). He also thinks that his web page was awesome because it was made from "notepad scratch" (i.e., built with Windows Notepad instead of complex WYSIWYG tools like FrontPage); Chris forgets that while a lot of professional web designers also write raw HTML with text editors, they generally also have some eye for aesthetics.

Drawing techniques

Strange pen grips can be corrected with the assistance of school teachers. Chris slept through these lessons.

Chris has never even learned to hold a pen correctly. Instead of holding the front of the pen with the thumb and forefinger, he draws with his index finger sticking out and bent around the pen. Give this a try and see how long it takes for you to get carpal tunnel.

In CWC - Hand Drawn Original (2009) and Live Drawing Streams (2017), Chris demonstrated his drawing technique on video.

“	I don’t want to deal with the constant pencil sharpening and all that trash.	”
Chris giving one of his reasons for why he uses a pen for line art.

While most artists will produce multiple sketch versions of a single drawing, often layered on top of one another, Chris's confidence in his innate artistic ability is such that his first step in a page of Sonichu is drawing the final line art in pen before coloring it in with Crayola markers. If he makes a mistake, he shrugs it off and continues. There is no post-processing beyond adding text to word balloons with MS Paint and PhotoDeluxe. Attempts to inform him that digital coloring is more efficient and far less expensive than wasting gallons of marker ink filling in monocolor backgrounds have failed.

Visual style and anatomy

Nice arms you got there, Chris.

Try and work out what's meant to be happening here.

“	sonichu had kind of a childish art style, which i guess was your point. [...] i thought you meant it as an avant-garde thing, to make a statment like, ironically bad	”
Jackie

Before the comics, Chris attempted realism for work in oil pastel, charcoal, and graphite, presumably for art classes in school. The results can be seen in the gallery below.

Chris started out with a cartoony style for the comic book, full of techniques consistent with early efforts at drawing by small children. Things changed as Chris got into anime and manga, and sought to emulate them to impress his gal-pal at the time, Megan Schroeder. Like many amateur western artists, he copies only the surface elements of the anime style: big eyes, pentagonal heads, speed lines, emotions. These art elements were simply laid over his original "style" with no adjustment.

This woman has three elbows.

Chris makes no attempt to maintain consistency in character designs, and has no understanding of classical anatomy and proportion in figure drawing. His characters are drawn using simple shapes--colored-in outlines, without any shading, ever--and even so, he is unable to keep the shapes consistent to any degree. For example, in the opening of Sonichu #11, the children tend to noticeably get deformed in a different manner in each panel, despite the fact that they're drawn as just an oval for the head, a rectangle for the body, and smaller ovals for the arms and legs.

In his hastiness to draw pornography of himself and Ivy, Chris seems to have forgotten that wrists and forearms are incapable of twisting in such a way without causing serious injuries.

Something's not right with this picture...

In all characters, limbs morph, heads change size, and faces become unrecognizable; it's only by color scheme that we can guess which character is which. Even then, Chris sometimes relies on labelling characters with text and arrows. Beyond his differently-colored eyes and Sonichu medallion, no two Chrises have ever looked alike, or even remotely resembled the actual Chris. The character sizes are also inconsistent, which is strange considering most of the characters appear to be about the same size: in most drawings where Sonichu is carrying Rosechu, Rosechu seems to shrink.

Chris is an expert at proportion.

Finer details of human anatomy have long escaped him; because Chris never draws women with pronounced hips, the results tend to resemble children or men (such as with the character Lovely Weather), with unfortunate implications in either case.

This car will either always veer left or never run at all.

Despite boasting that his "drawings of perspective viewpoints are surpassive[sic]" due to his training in CADD, Chris constantly fails at perspective, with objects implied to be far-away depicted too large. This is evident in his many vehicle designs, where the front is usually a direct frontal (90 degree) view, regardless of the view angle of other sides. This inability to demonstrate parallel lines renders the car distorted. The lack of any concept of shading only further destroys any semblance of perspective; legs that are implied to be bent forward at the knee only end up looking shorter.

Possibly the worst offender is Chris's constant omission of backgrounds. Most scenes happen only on the white backdrop of the paper. Apparently, readers are supposed to infer what the background looks like based on context, similar to some daily newspaper comic strips. Thus, simply drawing a wide-angle shot of the scenery as the first (usually transitional) panel in a scene would suffice. Combined with his inability to make a proper layout, many action scenes end up becoming a jumble of characters moving around without regards to sequence. The reason he does this is probably the same as the reason why he textwalls so often: to "save marker ink," meaning he's lazy. (Incidentally, the proper use of white space and the conservation of painted space is a key element in East Asian art, but despite his anime obsession he is unlikely to have heard of this.)

A related phenomenon is simply drawing characters as floating disembodied heads. The deus ex machina/exposition machine is the biggest victim of this. Once again, Chris couldn't bother to draw a full body. Thus, combining all known forms of "marker ink conservation", some pages are just a bunch of literal talking heads speaking walls of text.

Chris owns at least one book about drawing manga, as seen in My Half of A Whole New World for Kacey. The book in itself covers everything to do with portraying couples, including images of couples in bed making love. Whether Chris bought it to better draw out his delusional fantasies or for more material to mass debate to isn't known. Either way, the book has taught him nothing.

Character design

Main article: Chris and writing#Characterization

A large portion of the Sonichu cast is clearly derivative of existing characters. In addition to the obvious Sonic the Hedgehog recolors, Chris has lifted designs from any anime, video game, or even Western animation he is fond of, with no regard for visual consistency.

Beyond that, he doesn't even bother trying to design better clothing for his characters. Most of them wear stereotypical "basic" clothing, and Chris himself wears his usual clown shirts and pants. With the sole exception of Meg-chan, every female that shows up in his comics wears high-heeled dress shoes.

Even when the source of Chris's plagiarism is readily apparent, these lifts can still add up to less than the sum of their parts. Inspired by the fusion characters of Dragon Ball Z and God of War, Collosal Chan looks more like a hobo than a fusion of Chris and Chris-Chan Sonichu. Though clearly his own effort to design baby Pokémon, Sonee and Rosey look more unnerving than adorable.

While the designs themselves are shitty, Chris does get color coordination. Most of the color schemes he uses for his characters look decent. Being Chris, he still fails occasionally, like, on an unrelated note, the CWCipedia color scheme. Still, it's one of his few strong points, at least compared to the rest of his art style. As evidenced by most of his websites, custom console skins and a good chunk of his character designs, Chris's favourite colour combination appears to be yellow and various shades of cyan.

Fan (dis)service

Insta-boner.

Fan service is a term used to describe something that is meant to tease or please the audience. It can refer to any content seen as an effort to appease the desires of fans, but is used primarily, and in this section, to describe scenes of a sexually titillating nature.

Since his discovery by the Internet, Chris has inserted increasingly large amounts of fan service into the initially tame Sonichu in an effort to assert the heterosexuality of himself and his characters. The range of fan service in Sonichu includes panty shots, Rosechu's stripping, cameltoe indentations, and even a full sex scene followed by four pages of text and diagrams describing Sonichu and Rosechu's sexual anatomy.

He made sure to draw Battery-Charge Heart's skirt so short, we can see the carpet matches the drapes.

Due to his lack of artistic faculties, much of Chris's depictions of sexuality are highly unsettling to most readers. Any attempts to add "sexy" material come across as Chris's own wish-fulfillment or self-interest, rather than attempts by Chris to please his audience.

While the point of fan service is to hint at sexuality in an otherwise clean work meant for general audiences, Sonichu's sexual content hides nothing and disturbs many, despite the fact that Chris has always viewed Sonichu as a comic intended for children.

Comic writing and structure

Main article: Chris and writing

Good or complex art is not mandatory for making a good comic. Randall Munroe created XKCD, a webcomic with faceless stick figures for main characters. Unlike Sonichu, XKCD reached massive popularity, and it spawned a series of scientific-themed books with the stickmen as its characters. What it lacked in artistic talent, it made up for in its writing and humor.

However, Sonichu doesn't even have that to fall back on. Chris does no preparatory writing or preliminary revision; his narrative is wholly improvised and shifts regularly. He cannot write clear, succinct dialogue, and he has little regard for visual clarity.

He doesn't understand how comics are supposed to work as a narrative through sequential images, and instead presents the comic more like a storyboard for a hypothetical television series. As a whole, the series has excessive dialogue, use of phrases (i.e., "cuts grass") as a substitute for action and/or onomatopoeia, and divides itself into "episodes," a concept unheard of in the comic book industry. Perhaps Chris isn't interested in art or comics – he's just interested in Sonichu.

Other arts

One of the replica medals

Looks like we have ourselves a seamstress.

In addition to drawing, Chris has practiced many other forms of art.

Animation

Chris has taken up a new medium in the form of animation. Using the Nintendo DSi program Flipnote Studio, Chris has taken his drawing to a whole new level. Or at least could have. His drawing has degraded greatly when doing artwork here, mostly due to using the DS's stylus pen. When doing animations, his characters have very little fluid movement to them and they seem to jerk and wobble, as if they're characters from Ed, Edd n Eddy or Home Movies. The best one to tell of this is the Don'tGetTrolled! animation. You can tell which part was animated by Chris and which part was animated by the original author, 8-Bit, because Chris's artwork just wobbles in a distorted fashion.

3D Media

Chris's most famous works of 3D art are his Sonichu Medallions, made out of Crayola FUCKIN' Model Magic and acrylic paint. In September of 2014, Chris started selling replicas of his handcrafted medals, produced to various qualities.

He has also made Sonichu Amiibo by Frankensteining multiple Amiibos together and crudely painting them.

Another 3D piece is his Sonic Totem from middle school, which sold on eBay for $1500 USD.

Photography

Calling Chris's photography mediocre is putting it nicely. His focus, framing, and lighting are so bad, that most people with a phone can do much better. His horrendous photography skills are also reflected in his cinematography.

Music

Chris also produces music. Both of his acts are just him terribly singing parody lyrics over copyrighted songs.

Sewing

Chris "restored" his classic striped shirt himself before attempting to sell it.

Spray-painting

He spray-painted his shoes in Shoe Colouring.

Costume Design

Main article: Chris and cosplaying

Continuing his trend of using the cheapest materials possible while incorporating only the vaguest of likenesses, Chris's foray in cosplay is par for the course with his hand-drawings. They're poorly made, not thought out, and Chris likely believes they're professional quality.

Originality

See also: Things Chris has ripped off

When it comes to originality, Chris has absolutely none. Let's leave it at that.

Plagiarism

Main article: Chris and copyright

Sonichu is a fine blend of a wide variety of recognizable copyrighted elements. Just about any existing medium that Chris has ever expressed a fondness for appears in some capacity.

Chris has a long history of claiming all credit for fan characters initially acknowledged as being created by others and offered for use in Chris's comics. The first of these were Megagi, Jiggliami, and Layla, but the most infamous instance, and the one that Chris defended the most fervently, was Simonla Rosechu.

At the same time, Chris once had a policy of threatening nonexistent legal action against the creators of any Sonichu fan art he could find, and was worked into a magnificent rage over the Sonichu-derivative fan parody Asperchu.

As well, Chris has gone so far as to take a video, the aforementioned Don'tGetTrolled!, and alter it to suit his needs. Now, granted, there were other videos done using that same video, but where they just altered the stick character or sped up the video in the same vein as a YouTube Poop, Chris completely and utterly altered the video to suit his needs so that a humorous song about trolling is turned into Chris's mouthpiece to destroy Freedom of Speech to make the Internet safer for him.

Art gallery

High school art

Seen below is a selection of Chris's public school art assignments, from a slideshow on Chris's homemade DVD. At his high school graduation, Chris expected to be "Highly Recognized" for his "ARTISTIC TALENT", represented in this body of work. When he was not, he cried. This work was produced under the supervision of a professional art instructor and the incentive for Chris to give each piece more thought, care and attention than he now prefers to when creating only for his own satisfaction. Despite this, they're still terrible. Note that some readers may find several of these images inadvertently terrifying.

Gallery

Defending the honor of junk food everywhere! Sculpted in such a way that it looks like a toilet at first blush. Fox McCloud, one month after crash-landing in the middle of Africa. This thing deserves its own page by now. The teacher quickly thought up something to keep Chris occupied for the rest of the lesson. Coming soon from Franklin Mint... Ancient relic of the Cherokian Clan. It doesn't catch dreams. It stares into your soul. Sad to say, it was originally Chris who came up with the "Long fish is loooooo oooooooooooong" meme. Scan of a print of a photograph of drawings. How very meta! Autism is in Living Room. Autism is in Wife. Autism is in Children and - well - Autism is in Life. A rare shot of Chris's largely forgotten Pokémons, Espanolic and Vegaton. Banjo, the champion of Christianity and bright colors. In the first lesson, the computer graphics teachers usually say something like "Don't go crazy with the effects, m'kay?" Chris never listens. A Magic Eye picture that reveals absolutely nothing. We tried. The teacher who traumatized Chris wasn't actually the principal - it was the art teacher, who forced Chris to make a drawing with prickly-wicklies. Chris's masterpiece of originality, second only to the creation of Sonichu: an ash tray that shoots tobacco straight to the Sun - powered by dark magic. Some Ancient Cherokian anal beads. It's... off-center. Sonic unfocuses. Chris's shield was eaten. Following in Ed Gein's footsteps. We don't know what this is, but it has the letter C, so it's obviously Chris's. A relaxing person who bears little resemblance to Chris. The same. Hilariously enough, Todd Goldman ripped off the "I just don't listen" things on the background. Everything is interconnected! Tracing and ignorance, fiercely entangled! Proto-Cheroki-Chan. A big golden turd. OH, GOD! What does this mean? Art class pictures usually have some sort of central idea the teacher gave to the students. Chris is unable to communicate it to us. It's a passable drawing, so it's possible Chris didn't fail the class. But if it is a drawing of failure, did he also create his first time paradox here? Chris approaches a wild Pikachu, aiming to bash its brains out with a rare pygmy Electrode. A clever idea. Probably his teacher's, though. Something that looks like the shopping mall, but actually isn't. "I wish I were in Jamacia" (sic). Deep-rooted wishes, I see. Colorful arboreal antics. Possibly "L" and "O". Could be a corruption of LOL. Raichu, the Turbo Megazord, Sonic, Game Boy and Nintendo 64 controller. See, he can draw a proportional drinking straw. The Oversized Drinking Straw of Fail was deliberate. Indistinct shapes, possibly crabs. A collage of weird local imagery. Daffodils, which, in Greek mythology, first came forth as a result of narcissism. Also: Skeleton. The Bear keeps on truckin'. Jars. A proudly standing bottle and a tomato, casting nice round shadows. Mysterious floating keyring. Not sure what this is, but it looks a bit phallic. Chris's Ash Ketchum get-up. Pikachu, Mew, what looks like Chris's personal Pokégear stuff, and an ad for CWC's Pokésite 2. Shower??? A drawer full of what appears to be socks and DIRTY, CRAPPED BRIEFS. R.L. Stine books and Pokémon.

Tracing

Tracing is an art technique where another piece of art, in whole or part, is copied along its outlines. As a means of producing original art claimed as one's own, tracing is a form of plagiarism.

Images traced from existing copyrighted content appear regularly in Sonichu. Chris traces with the Reflecta Sketch, a long-discontinued toy tracing kit produced by Spin Master. The kit comes with a reflective piece of plastic where an original can be placed to the left and the reflection is used for tracing an outline. This is why most traced images in Sonichu are mirror images of the original work. Due to their poor quality, consistent in appearance with Sonichu art that is not traced, these traced images often go unnoticed as tracing. The fact that Chris fails even at tracing is a surprise to no one.

Alternatively, Chris uses these images as references and simply tries to draw images free-hand based on them. This is no worse than directly tracing the outlines, but better explains why his results are so distorted in respect to their references. Chris probably uses a combination of both techniques (as some images look closer to their originals than others), showing utter lack of skill and originality either way.

The coveted art award at his high school graduation would have lost a crap ton of prestige had it been awarded to a cheater like Chris.

Traced images from the Sonichu Comic
Rosey caesar.jpg

Rule 34

Chris's creations believe that his Rule 34 artwork is "lifelike".

Chris has no shame, and neither does his artwork. Of his many sexually explicit drawings, the most damning one of all is ShecameforCWC.JPG, which brought an end to the Megan Saga and cemented the notion that Chris was an incestuous pedofork.

As seen in this gallery, Chris can't even copy bad porn to save his life, with Rosechu turning into a deformed monstrosity in each panel, all for the sake of sex. Especially noticeable is the final picture, which shows off a recurring trend in his pictures: the "Glowing Cunt", in which Chris draws the "cum" from the woman around and outside the vagina instead of from the inside, making it appear to glow, or inhabit heavenly clouds.

It can be reasonably assumed that all of the images in this gallery are traced, and that those not paired plagiarized source material simply have yet to have their "inspirations" discovered.

Gallery of traced Rule 34 pictures. Incredibly horrific, NSFW, and contains robo-clits. This is your last chance to escape with your sanity.

Tomgirl art

Drawings Chris made while a Tomgirl. Some are NSFW.

Gallery

My Mind Is a Blank, January 2015. Pink Lemonade, July 2015. Caricature of Cole Smithey burning his money, June 2016. Chris's LGBT poster for the Sonichu series, May 2017. The S stands for straight. Crossover fanart of Sonichu and Planet Dolan, May 2017. Miss Night Star, June 2017, Chris's self-insert imagined as a MLP character. Note the redrawn Sonichu #0 cover. Crossover with MLP characters, June 2017. Flat-chested women, April 2018. For Pride Month, June 2018.

Art for Catherine, 2014
Zoomed in Another zoom

Paid art

Drawings from Chris's eBay and Etsy sales.

Main article: Original Sonichu and Rosechu Drawing

Main article: Commissions